14 DAY TRIAL // According to the results of a European Science Foundation (ESF) workshop, it may be that sleep therapy could help treat patients with psychosis. Experts have found that brain activity patterns in people dreaming are roughly the same ones that occur in psychosis episodes. Additionally, others have proposed over the years that a strong evolutionary correlation may exist between the two phenomena, and the scientists at the meeting have proposed that dreaming may be an efficient way to combat psychosis.
“In the field of psychiatry, the interest in patients' dreams has progressively fallen out of both clinical practice and research. But this new work seems to show that we may be able to make comparisons between lucid dreaming and some psychiatric conditions that involve an abnormal dissociation of consciousness while awake, such as psychosis, depersonalization and pseudo-seizures,” Silvio Scarone, who holds an appointment at the Universita degli Studi di Milano, in Milan, Italy, explains.
The experts underline the fact that lucid dreaming and psychosis are very similar. In the case of the former, people know they are awake, but are also aware that they are dreaming at the same time. This hybrid state of mind generates distinct patterns of electrical activity in the human cortex, which can be recorded using electroencephalograms (EEG), for example. Expert Ursula Voss, from the University of Frankfurt, in Germany, argues that lucid dreaming sends the brain into a dissociated state, in which patients lose conscious control over mental processes, including logical thinking or emotional reaction.
“On the one hand, basic dream researchers could now apply their knowledge to psychiatric patients with the aim of building a useful tool for psychiatry, reviving interest in patients' dreams. On the other hand, neuroscience investigators could explore how to extend their work to psychiatric conditions, using approaches from sleep research to interpret data from acute psychotic and dissociated states of the brain-mind,” Scarone adds, quoted by ScienceDaily.
“Exposure to real threatening events supposedly activates the dream system, so that it produces simulations that are realistic rehearsals of threatening events in terms of perception and behavior. This theory works on the basis that the environment in which the human brain evolved included frequent dangerous events that posed threats to human reproduction. These would have been a serious selection pressure on ancestral human populations and would have fully activated the threat simulation mechanisms,” he concludes.